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Essay on Liberated Women Of Malaysia
Complaining of the introversion of current anthropological critiques of modernity, in her book "Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: factory women in Malaysia, Aihwa Ong insists that it is not the singular force we suppose it to he. Using some familiar modernist categories (nation, race, culture) she distinguishes domestic and expatriate ('coastal') varieties of Malay modernity.
She produces some brilliant critical images of Confucianism and Karaoke, but the resolutely 'other' vision of plural modernities which she seeks through 'contrapuntal analysis' and mobile anthropological subjectivity' eludes her. (Ong, 1987)
The view from within modernity seems to offer little more than a spectacle of infinite regression, an ultimately frustrating pursuit of authentic difference at ever-widening levels of modernist refraction.
The promise of any generalized moral perception for anthropology likewise dwindles to the feeblest common denominator of 'doubt' and a commitment to 'minimal modern human rights' (Ong, 1987). As Ong puts it: 'belonging nowhere and everywhere has been the necessary condition for understanding twentieth-century experience' (Ong, 1987). The news from the various liminal (not 'marginal') intellectual spaces which these three have occupied is that such understanding is very far from uniform.
Ong asks the unsettling question about the relation of bodies and the conditions of work in the era of late capital: "What are the implications of a global production system in which relations of gender and of race are critical for the expansion of economic and symbolic capital?" (Ong, 1987). She answers that no "inherent logic in capitalist relations and labor resistance" can be said to exist historically since the particular relation of transnational corporations and national or domestic formations will always condition the "specific strategies that are worked out to best mobilize flexible labor" (Ong, 1987).
Her book emphasizes the need for specific ethnographies of the politics of embodiment; it is this proposal that most interests me for my present purposes. Ong depicts....
